The news that the NRA helped fund a Junior ROTC marksmanship team at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida and that the expelled student who killed 17 people there had participated on that team has received the kind of attention you'd expect such news to receive. Whenever there's a school shooting, there's a collective attempt -- however futile -- to make sense of it all. In that context, it shouldn't come as a surprise that people who rightly believe the gun lobby is a toxic influence in America are going to seize upon a link -- indirect, though it is -- between the NRA and a school shooter.

But instead of focusing on the NRA's grant to the school's marksmanship efforts, how about we focus on the existence of the Junior ROTC on that high school campus? The mission of the Army JROTC is "to motivate young people to be better citizens." That mission implies that teenagers aren't too young to be good citizens. "I am the future of the United States of America," JROTC's cadets learn to recite as part of their creed. That suggests that it's OK -- actually that it's necessary -- for them to be thinking about the future of their country.

If the belief that high school students can be good citizens is not controversial, if the idea of young people thinking about the future is not absurd, then we shouldn't be hearing criticisms of the students who made it out of that school alive and are demanding that their public officials take steps to protect them.

But as the nation recoils in horror at yet another school shooting and students from Stoneman Douglas cry out in anguish, some people opposed to any kind of gun restrictions have decided to go after the children, to dismiss them as frauds or as too young, too emotional or too easily manipulated to warrant attention.

An aide to Florida state Rep. Shawn Harrison was fired after he claimed to a Tampa Bay Times reporter that two Stoneman Douglas students who've made multiple media appearances "are not students here but actors that travel to various crisis (sic) when they happen."

Alex Jones, infamous for the website Infowars and his lie that the December 2012 massacre inside a Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school didn't really happen, is suggesting that the Florida shooting was carried out by gun-control advocates to turn the nation against the gun lobby and gun ownership.

"Everything they're doing is right out of the Democrat Party's various playbooks," Rush Limbaugh said of the students. "It has the same enemies: the NRA and guns."

Jack Kingston, a CNN commentator and a former congressman from Georgia, said on CNN, "Their sorrow can very easily be hijacked by left-wing groups -- who have an agenda. Well, let's ask ourselves, do we really think -- and I say this sincerely. Do we really think 17-year-olds on their own are going to plan a nationwide rally?"

Does the involvement of adults make the actions of students less heartfelt and significant? Do we say that about the JROTC? Do we say that students who are pledging to "practice good citizenship and patriotism," students who are seeking the "mantle of leadership" aren't really serious because they're not acting independently of adults?

Not every student at Stoneman Douglas is crying out for more gun control. A JROTC student there told a reporter that he doesn't think restricting guns is the solution. Kingston and Limbaugh and Jones could easily make the argument that that student is being manipulated by the NRA.

But that's not how the game is played. Young people who go along with the status quo -- or who don't challenge the people and powers who are running things -- are not criticized as too young or immature to hold the positions they hold. Those labels are reserved for their counterparts holding an opposite view of things.

The decision to use children to march against segregation in 1963 Birmingham was roundly derided. Martin Luther King Jr. had to be convinced by his aides to agree to it, and a wide range of people -- from the mayor of Birmingham to U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy to The New York Times' editorial page -- objected.

But when we look at those pictures today of children being fire hosed, children being menaced by German shepherds, children being led into police wagons, none of us say -- well, none of us should say -- that those children were on the wrong side of the issue or that they shouldn't have done what they did.

Yes, they were invited to participate by adults, but those children decided that they didn't want the deadly segregation that existed during their childhood to still be around for their own children.

And so they did something about it. The students at Stoneman Douglas aren't too young to want a express their hopes for a less deadly future for their children. And they're not so old or so jaded that they think such a future is preposterous.